A chess blog looking at a wide variety of topics including tactics, openings, strategy, study, chess history, current professional chess and amateur chess.

Monday, August 23, 2010

2010 Philadelphia Inventors: Jennifer Shahade

Jennifer Shahade is a Woman Grandmaster. She is very active in promoting chess. She has written the book Chess Bitch and was recently a caster for the 2010 US Chess Championship. She is also a good poker player, achieving some very good results in big tournaments. She came in 33rd out of about 1200 during the Ladies World Series of Poker Tournament. If you have not played much Poker, you can trust me that that is very impressive! She is also in the Philadelphia Chess Hall of Fame.

Lets look at some games.

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Here is a very cool Sicilian Dragon game where Jennifer Shahade sacrifices an exchange and gets a good endgame. For anyone who wants to play the Sicilian Dragon, make a special note to yourself about the way Jennifer Shahade is fine going into the endgame. She doesnt try to avoid Queen trades or anything like that, and she plays the classic Rxc3 exchange sacrifice even though White castles King side. This game does a good job of showing the underlying positional justifications for a lot of Black's play. Normally, these things can be hidden underneath all of the tactical justifications, but they are there!

Well, I still have 3 more players to go, so I am going to have to cut these last ones a bit short as far as looking at games goes.

I believe she has two International Master norms. She needs one more and a 2400 rating to become an International Master, which is not an easy task but very possible. I dont think she can get a norm in the US Chess League, but she can certainly get her rating up.